Ricketts group weighs Jeremiah Wright ads

By ALEXANDER BURNS

05/17/2012 05:44 AM EDT

The New York Times reports this morning on a proposal, under consideration by the financier of the Ending Spending super PAC, to go nuclear against President Obama in ways no mainstream Republican has:

The plan, which is awaiting approval, calls for running commercials linking Mr. Obama to incendiary comments by his former spiritual adviser, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., whose race-related sermons made him a highly charged figure in the 2008 campaign.

“The world is about to see Jeremiah Wright and understand his influence on Barack Obama for the first time in a big, attention-arresting way,” says the proposal, which was overseen by Fred Davis and commissioned by Joe Ricketts, the founder of the brokerage firm TD Ameritrade. Mr. Ricketts is increasingly putting his fortune to work in conservative politics.

The $10 million plan, one of several being studied by Mr. Ricketts, includes preparations for how to respond to the charges of race-baiting it envisions if it highlights Mr. Obama’s former ties to Mr. Wright, who espouses what is known as “black liberation theology.”

The group suggested hiring as a spokesman an “extremely literate conservative African-American” who can argue that Mr. Obama misled the nation by presenting himself as what the proposal calls a “metrosexual, black Abe Lincoln.”

A copy of a detailed advertising plan was obtained by The New York Times through a person not connected to the proposal who was alarmed by its tone. It is titled “The Defeat of Barack Hussein Obama: The Ricketts Plan to End His Spending for Good.”

It's hard to know how seriously to take a pitch like this. As the Times notes, it doesn't actually have money behind it yet, and public exposure may not make that more likely. It would be an enormous risk for Ricketts to take, and not necessarily one his party as a whole would welcome.

The Ricketts super PAC is a new arrival on the outside spending scene — it gave Republican Deb Fischer an essential boost ahead of this week's Nebraska Senate primary — and is evidently looking to get a lot of attention in short order. An incendiary anti-Obama ad from Fred Davis (the man behind, among many other spots, McCain's "celebrity" ad, Pete Hoekstra's "Debbie Spend-It-Now" and Christine O'Donnell's "I am not a witch") would be one way to do that.